The Silliness of "Strong Female Characters"

Hello again! I know that I haven't posted in ages, and that you've all been foaming at the mouth, waiting for my next dispatch. I'm sorry to have disappointed you. It's summer, so I'm working full-time, hanging out with my family and my partner, and being generally lazy. I've also been playing Portal 2, which is a massive timesuck a terrific game.

I enjoy video games immensely, but I didn't grow up playing them (and I enjoy other things more), so I get easily frustrated playing games where every second is spent in motion, either shooting at or ducking from hostile things. I did, on the other hand, grow up with logic puzzles and situations that called for extreme attention to detail-- two ingredients critical to success in the Portal series. (If you're looking for a shorter, simpler game that values thinking over accuracy with rifles, check out Limbo).

The way the game works isn't the only reason I like Portal and Portal 2 so much. I'd be lying if I said I didn't love their protagonist, Chell (the "ch" is pronounced like "church"). Why? Well, first of all, Chell looks like this:

In case you can't tell, Chell is biologically female and wearing a decidedly un-sexy jumpsuit. Second, her sex has absolutely nothing to do with the storyline. At no point does she seduce anyone, dress in anything other than the standard Aperture Science uniform, or behave in a gendered way. At a few points, GLaDOS (the antagonist) makes reference to Chell's weight and appearance, but this is because GLaDOS is a robot who understands that weight disparity is something humans are often concerned about. There is no reason why Chell had to be female. The test subject could easily be male. But that's not what Valve (Portal's developer) chose to do, and for that, I thank them.

There are many, many people responsible for producing media who seem to think that a female protagonist (any female protagonist) will silence those whiny feminists who are always complaining that they rarely portray women as anything other than objects to be won by male characters. "Ha ha!" they say, as they create scantily-clad female characters like those in Tomb Raider, Aeon Flux, and Sucker Punch, "this will show them!" But these characters are almost always murderous, gun-toting hardasses who end the lives of enemies with crazy explosions and devilish seductions and who would rather die than be seen crying. If this kind of description seems familiar, it's because it is. "Strong female characters" are, more often than not, simply a Male Action Hero with big boobs and a revealing costume.

Pictured: my impressive MS Paint skills

I'm clearly not the only one who has noticed this. Carina Chocano just wrote a great piece for The New York Times Magazine in which she bemoans the need for diversity in the personalities of quote-unquote "strong female characters:"

"Maybe I’m a cream puff, but few cultural tropes get under my skin like “strong female character,” and it still surprises me when like-minded people use it. Maybe the problem is semantic. Maybe what people mean when they say “strong female characters” is female characters who are “strong,” i.e., interesting or complex or well written — “strong” in the sense that they figure predominantly in the story, rather than recede decoratively into the background. But I get the feeling that what most people mean or hear when they say or hear “strong female character” is female characters who are tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to scowling and not saying goodbye when they hang up the phone."

Chocano rightly points out that these kinds of characters "reinforce the unspoken idea that in order for a female character to be worth identifying with, she should really try to rein in the gross girly stuff. This implies that unless a female character is 'strong,' she is not interesting or worth identifying with." An example of this that immediately comes to my mind is Megan Fox's character in the first two Transformers movies. She's lean and sexy, but is also deemed "cool" and dangerous because she's a lean and sexy car-thief-turned-mechanic. 

The problem (well, one of them) is that identifying and portraying "lean, sexy, and dangerous" as the only "strong female characters" doesn't pay proper respect to more realistic representations of strong females. You probably already know that I consider Kristen Wiig's character in Bridesmaids to be a strong female character. Chocano agrees, explaining that, "We don’t relate to her despite the fact that she is weak, we relate to her because she is weak" (emphasis mine). 

Of all the women in my life, only one of them has a permit to carry a concealed weapon (or maybe I just don't know about the others). So, according to the Hollywood, my mother, my grandmother, many of my favorite teachers and professors, and most of my friends couldn't be defined as "strong." (I say "most" of my friends not because I have more female than male friends, but because my friend Arianna is the one with the concealed weapon. Watch your back.) This definition is, however, incredibly flawed, because every one of these (smart, funny, kind) women has survived difficult challenges with strength that can't be measured in ammunition expended or expensive cars destroyed.

And now Kate Beaton, the wonderful and talented illustrator, will elucidate in several panels what I just tried to explain with several hundred words.

Find the whole hilarious comic here.

Are there any female characters in movies/videogames/comics that you love or that drive you crazy? Tell me about them in the comments!

What's so funny about Bridesmaids?

Simply put: everything.

A few days ago, after reading favorable Facebook updates and this Salon article, I went to see Bridesmaids with my boyfriend, Dan. If you haven't heard about this movie, do yourself a favor and watch the trailer this instant. It would be a gross understatement to say that I enjoyed it. I loved it. I didn't think it would be possible for me to love co-writer and star Kristen Wiig (whose work on Saturday Night Live is beyond hilarious) any more than I already did, but watching her play witty, frustrated, down-and-out Annie was pure ecstasy. What adds even more to this slice of awesomepie is that Bridesmaids passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. Here, funny female actresses play funny, multidimensional female characters who love, hate, talk to, try to one-up, and yes, vomit on each other (the last one is part of the much-talked-about but far-from-funniest scene in the film, which producer Judd Apatow added to Wiig's script).

I laughed so hard that my abs hurt and I almost peed. I was so high on life and the fact that Hollywood had produced a movie that featured women, but focused on their friendships instead of shopping habits or long-lost loves, that I existed on a plane of media nirvana. Well, I did until Dan's sister asked how the movie was and he replied that it was, "good, but definitely a chick flick." (Insert record scratch here.) Dan isn't sexist or mean or close-minded. He embraces how passionate I am about feminism and I have, on several occasions, succeeded in convincing him that some of the things he loves (like Fight Club) hate women. But in this moment, I thought I might burn the house down. I didn't do that because we were in Dan's family's house, which is extremely nice and probably very, very expensive. He has since rescinded and apologized for this comment, but unfortunately, he isn't the only person applying this term to Bridesmaids; plenty of reviewers have called it a "chick flick" too.

Let me make something clear: Bridesmaids is not a "chick flick."
It is, to quote a great A/V Club piece, "a well-crafted comedy that just happens to feature an all-female cast." Anyone who has even moderate interest in watchable films knows that the term "chick flick" is shorthand for "terrible movie." I don't watch movies that pander to the princess/one-true-love dreams that my Barbie-filled childhood was supposed to instill in me (sorry, Nicholas Sparks), so I don't watch "chick flicks." Bridesmaids has no relation to this kind of sappy bullshit. People are only calling it a "chick flick" because it's so uncommon to see funny movies (or really any movies) that treat women as anything other than extras. More than sixty years after Simone de Beauvoir penned "Woman as Other," most of Hollywood continues to pretend that (heterosexual and white, but that's another story) men are the only people worthy of being protagonists. Even when they're not sidelined as love interests, femme fatales, or nagging termagants, women in films are defined by their relationships to men, as if all women ever do is search desperately for love.

Bridesmaids is similarly not a romantic comedy. It is a comedy. There is romance. Those two facts do not a rom-com make. Rom-coms are as bad as  or worse than "chick-flicks," and moreover, this combination is older than dirt. Any English major worth her weight in leatherbound books knows that tragedies end in funerals, and comedies end in weddings (or at least new romantic relationships). If you doubt me, please see summaries of every Shakespeare play ever written. And if  that's still not enough, consider the endings of canonical "dude" movies like The Forty-Year Old Virgin; Superbad; The Hangover; I Love You, Man; and Knocked Up. Despite thematic and plot similarities regarding romance, Bridesmaids has been deemed a "rom-com" simply because the protagonist is female.

The assumption behind making films almost exclusively about men is that men don't want to see movies about women. It's probably because all we talk about is our vaginas and menstrual cycles and dresses and makeup and when our men are finally going to give us big diamond engagement rings, am I right ladies? This assumption is stupid for two reasons. First off, I know very few men who would dislike a movie simply because there were women in it. I'm sure there are some out there, but I refuse to believe that this is a legitimate reason to avoid making movies with female characters. Second, gasp! women are people too, and therefore have goals, flaws, fears, dreams, and all of those other silly things that make humans human. The characters in Bridesmaids have them too, which is straight-up awesome. Some critics say that its success (it's currently at #1) could usher in a new era of films featuring women who don't exist in a world that revolves around shoes and penises.

I'm a bit less optimistic. It would take more than one great movie to change this paradigm, and I'm sure that Hollywood will release about forty terrible rom-coms and chick flicks in the time it takes to make another female-driven movie this funny. I also feel obliged to point out that Wiig's "loser" character is infinitely more attractive and successful than the typical Apatow slacker. Annie is poor, but she is so because the bakery she started went under and she's making ends meet at a tiny jewelery store owned by her mom's AA sponsor. She romps through the movie wearing makeup, a stylish haircut, and (very often) minidresses with blazers and heels. Compare that to characters like those played by Seth Rogen or Zach Galifianakis. These men are usually self-absorbed, pot-smoking, potbellied guys whose lack of style and hygiene only adds to their "charm." Nothing like that would ever be considered acceptable by American viewing audiences if the chubby, dorky protagonist was a chubby, dorky woman. Though Bridesmaids does make considerable strides in the right direction, they're still strides made by impeccable legs in towering heels.

So how do we talk about Bridesmaids? Do we call it an "amped-up rom-com" or a "raunchy chick flick?" Or do we stop trying to force it into meaningless, gendered boxes that don't do it justice? Maybe we should simply acknowledge its comic genius and call it "a terrifically funny movie," because that's exactly what it is. I personally promise you that Bridesmaids is smarter than The Hangover, as funny as Superbad, and totally worth the ticket price. Go see it.

Update (5/23):  I just found this in the NPR review of the movie. When I used the term "raunchy chick flick" above, I wasn't quoting anyone. It just seemed like the type of thing that someone might say about Bridesmaids. I guess I was right.

This article, by the way, is not worth reading.